CHRISTMAS IN GERMANY

Christmas Eve dinner table.  Elaine is a master at recreating home.

 Looks like we are going to make it through the season and  into a new year.  We still have our Christmas tree up, but Mutti admits she is glad to have it behind her as she was a bit teary at times.  We enjoyed some beautiful sunshine yesterday that is a great lift to spirits and have again enjoyed some nice walks in the country.  We are jealous of the Utah snow, but not the cold as the temperature usually climbs into the mid-40s during the day. Our country pretty much shuts down between Christmas and January 7^th, when the 3 wise men finally make to Bethlehem.  We were about the only senior missionaries in the Area Office last week and this week we get Monday and Tuesday off for the New Year’s holiday.  We are invited to the Brandes to welcome in the New Year with other Seniors on Monday.  We had better take a nap first. To my surprise, fireworks are allowed but Chinese brands are considered unsafe so Germany makes its own with fun English-sounding names on the packages like “Sky-Banger” and "Hero of the Night"!

AND THE WINNER IS..........

Well in my book you are all winners and we enjoyed your answers to last week's quiz.
Submissions were:
"Archery range ahead (with human targets!) - Bryce Craven
"Hunger Games Here" - Natalie Busath
"Trail Head" - Rich Busath
"Gathering Place" JB  Watsabaugh
"Pedestrian Crossing or Hey I'm Walking Here" - Ali Thackery

And the Prize goes to our good friend JB Watsabaugh for coming closest to the idea of the thing.  Apparently, if the nearby building has a fire or other catastrophe, the area around the sign is where people are supposed to go to meet up and be accounted for.  We have now noticed these in many areas and become more convinced there is a sign  for most everything here, we love it.

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

That's $8.00 US  for you Betty Crocker fans!

We are here snug in our little apartment on a dark and windy Sunday night  listening to Frank Sinatra singing “White Christmas” and thinking it’s not going to happen in Frankfurt this year.  Plenty of water from heaven, but just generally too warm for anything to stick for very long.  We’re not complaining though, given we still have a commute into the office every day.  We took a walk out into the country side this morning with our umbrellas against the wind and sideways rain.  The little river that runs past our town was high and fast and reminded us that when we drove past the Rhein yesterday, it looked at flood stage – right up to the road in some places.  I don’t know if Germany ever has a dry season but it’s not the fall or early winter.  We celebrated the winter solstice yesterday though and enjoyed the longer day today with ever better to come.  The ward choir put on the Christmas sacrament meeting today.  Elaine and I got to be readers as well as in the choir.  Lovely meeting with carols from France, Germany, and America.  Did you know that in Germany it is kosher only to sing Silent Night on Christmas Eve or very close to it.  The chorister in our German teacher’s ward scheduled it in sacrament meeting a couple weeks ago and shocked the congregation!

Our humble Christmas Tree

Authentic German Decorations!!

Look soo good, but filled with various liquorsss

Singing for the office Christmas Social

Candid shot of Mom checking on messages from home

2-story carousel at the Christmas Market

This week, in addition to working hard every day at the Public Affairs office, we enjoyed a fine German meal in Bad Homburg and the Russian ballet performing the Nutcracker on Thursday evening and Saturday went with three other missionary couples to Rudesheim to people watch , have a fun lunch and enjoy the Christmas decorations.

Enjoying our mission for sure, but wouldn’t mind dropping in at good friends and children’s homes this next week, oh well, we'll take a rain check until 2014.  Merry Christmas all!

YOU CAN'T WIN IF YOU DON'T ENTER

This week we are sponsoring a fabulous contest!! Correctly guess the meaning of the sign shown above and we will prominently display your name on our website along with the all the myriads of incorrect guesses.  No fair cheating by googling "goofy German traffic signs".




If the sign above just seems too baffling, you are invited to enter a guess in the consolation prize contest:

We bid farewell to our friends, the Bradleys, Monday night as they had us to dinner one last time before heading back to Holladay.  They have been a wonderful example of missionaries who have created their own mission and done much good.  One of their stories will appear in the Ensign sometime in the future and involves the conversion of a woman here in Germany due to a Book of Mormon containing Jack Ashton’s testimony.  Lonnie introduced us at dinner to another cute family they have been fellowshipping which she has turned over to us.

Starting next term Elaine will be taking over for Lonnie Bradley teaching English in a neighborhood elementary school one afternoon a week.  One of the mom’s will assist and it is her family we will continue to fellowship.

We’ve been told that the Church is good at inviting others into our circle.  We invite to Church, to Ward parties, to hear the missionaries.  But we fall short when it comes to joining others’ circles in the community.  So Elaine is  excited our  boss is allowing her to spend one afternoon a week out in a community circle.

Friday was official “clean out the office” day for the entire Europe Area Office.  The employees on all four floors came in dress down clothing and started making room for the new year by dumping old files and shredding old documents.  In the Public Affairs Office we pulled out about five years of old Christmas cards ( hundreds of leftover cards) and offered them to missionaries, employees, bishops and other departments.  Only a few made it to the dumpster.  We also shared cases of old Tab Choir Christmas CDs after convincing our boss that Angela Landsbury wasn’t doing any good sitting in the basement.  The kids in the ward and the missionaries passed out about 75 CDs as they caroled downtown for their mutual activity.

The highlight of the week was…drum roll….Elaine gave away her first Book of Mormon!  Friday afternoon we drove to Nürnberg where Reinhold and Connie Fetzer live.  Nürnberg hosts the largest Christmas market in Germany.  Booths, carnival rides, food vendors and musicians filled the streets and town square.  In this mob of people we met Reinhold and Connie and it was hugs all around as we felt an instant bond.  We visited over hot chocolate, arranging to meet the next morning for breakfast in their home.  After breakfast we talked genealogy and gave them a copy of the Book of Mormon along with some Tabernacle Choir CDs (they had never heard of the choir), a calendar of Utah and some Fetzer shirts and ball caps.  They are a darling couple who speak very good English, are interested in genealogy and are very friendly.  This relationship will continue as they have invited us back to Rothenburg where his parents live on their farm and we have invited them to learn to water ski in Utah.

Saturday afternoon we visited a museum at Hitler’s old rally grounds that told the story of the rise of the Nazi Party to power and ended with the Nurnberg trials in 1945.  Hitler had a big following in Nurnberg early in his rise.  We learned he seized power by violently crushing any opposition or opposing political party and the people were glad to let him do it as he was bringing respectability, self esteem and pride back to the German people after their embarrassing and crushing defeat in WW1.  He tricked them until they had given up all their freedoms or ability to oppose.  Good history lesson for those that just studied accounting in college.

THE FIRST ADVENT OF CHRISTMAS

With Taylor in Petite France, Strasbourg city center

 This past week it turned cold in Frankfurt, we had a good little snow storm Friday that left us with a light layer of snow and temperatures that stay below freezing.  They must use salt on the roads though as we haven’t slipped around much.  We spent last week in the office helping compile a Media Year Book to show Salt Lake how busy our countries have been in handling all the media attention this year, apparently no area has received as much interest as western Europe.  Our intern went home yesterday so we had a nice Christmas goose luncheon for her at a traditional German restaurant last Tuesday (mom said don't pass up any opportunities while we were here, so we are lenient with our diet from time to time).  Our director has a tender constitution and has been out sick all week. Last Friday was the employee/missionary Christmas devotional/luncheon and Elaine’s double quartet was the featured number for the devotional. Then we sang some hymnal carols for the lunch party afterward.  The little group gets to sing the same devotional song "Away in a Manger" in our ward today and in the Freidrichsdorf Ward next week.

We learned that our niece, Laurel McConkie and her husband, James, will be arriving in Prague this coming July to preside over the Czech/Slovak Mission.  So excited to have family only a couple hours away. They are recruiting office help if any of you are ready to serve as senior missionaries.

Christmas spirits!

We had a fun and different Saturday this week.  Taylor Anderson (married to our niece, Teresa) is in Germany on business, so we drove south a couple hours with the Brandes and picked him up at the train station in Karlsruhe, west of Stuttgart, then the 5 of us headed south another hour to Strasbourg, a French town just over the border.  

What a difference it made to Martin to be able to read the French signage and understand the people. (I learned compassion for Martin here in Germany as I suddenly couldn't understand a word. Martin's French came back, ordering French waffles and handling purchases for us all.)

The real deal - magnifique!

It was a sunny cold day and we spent some money in the open air Christmas markets set up in the town center areas (bought some fun French poster art), visited the ubiquitous old Catholic cathedral and then had a most fabulous French gourmet lunch with a price that confirmed how good the food was. We wanted to stick around till dark to see the lights and wandered into a Protestant cathedral that was just starting a public sing-along. That was a highlight of the day as we sang Christmas carols in French with the locals and tourists in the big high ceiling cathedral. We brought Taylor back to

Frankfurt last night as he is working here this week and we will pick him up for church and have him over for dinner afterward.

We are doing fine.  Maybe feeling a bit homesick due to the Christmas season, but I remind Elaine how she Is not stressed with the pressures of all her traditional Christmas preparations – don’t think it’s too much  consolation however.  We will do a 12 days of Christmas and go hometeaching this week, that should help.

This is the choir at the church sing-a-long - there to help us along.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN by Bilbo Baggins

On Tuesday November 21^st we jumped on the plane from Frankfurt and Spencer jumped on the plane from Rochester and we raced to Salt Lake for Thanksgiving and a wedding at long last.  We cannot say how good it was to see our family again if only for a little bit to celebrate this momentous event in our son’s life.  

We are thrilled for them and for their good lives that brought them together at the right time in the right place.  The Lord loves them and He loves their parents.

We are planning our annual National Public Affairs Director Seminar for Brussels next April and did some filming in Frankfurt before the trip home.  Here are Sister Brande, Elaine and I making a commercial tip for how to reach out to opinion leaders to develop a relationship with them.  First decide WHAT the objectives of your Public Affairs Counsel are, then ask WHO is in a position to influence the outcome of your objectives, and finally determine HOW to develop the relationship with that opinion leader.

For the rest of the year it looks like we are going to be busy creating a Europe Area Public Affairs Year Book to chronicle the huge quantity of media coverage the Church has received.

PS Got our first snow fall this morning:)  We say goodbye to the Bradleys who head home next week:(

STOP, GO, NO STOP!

This picture pretty much sums up the traffic sign situation here in Germany.  This is not trick photography, the stop sign is on the same pole as the traffic light above it.

Mixed emotions as we head home for Spencer’s wedding this next week.  We are so excited for him and Xan and to see, hug and kiss everyone we love, but also realize after this it’s a bit of a slog until we are with our loved ones again.

We are getting ready for a project to film local members answering gospel questions.  This will occur in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Germany early next year.  We have picked the questions they will get and have drafted answers to each that the members are to put in their own words.  The video clips will go on each country’s church website for the benefit of journalists and others looking for information about the church.

We are in charge of a service project in our international ward and have been organizing the senior missionary efforts to do 12 Days of Christmas for 3 families in the ward.

Last Friday, Elder Brande and Martin spent the afternoon in the attic of our Elders Quorum President, redoing his tile roofing.  They carried the bundles of clay fired tiles up 3 flights then from the inside pushed out the old tiles, sent them off a shoot to the back yard then laid the new tiles on the cross strips of the roof trusses.  It felt great to do some hard work and Martin was just sort of sore Saturday morning, but got more and more sore till he creaked and groaned by last night.  Scary to get old.

No big slabs of cement here. Sidewalks are all labor intensive but easily removable tiles.

My 99 cent fern.  Plants are very inexpensive here

Would you believe a home for insects.  Found along our  forest path.

With fellow senior missionary  members of our weekly German class.

Russian Orthodox Church in Wiesbaden just a half hour away from our apartment.

ANOTHER WEEK AND THE MORMON MOMENT FLY BY?

Is the Mormon Moment over in Europe? The phones were pretty quiet on Wednesday, time will tell and the Lord is in charge.

Enjoyed a nice rainy, windy week here this week.  The video newsroom filming in the UK went well, with many youth and adults participating in answering questions about the gospel and LDS living and bearing personal testimony from their experience.  These video clips will go on the UK's newsroom website for the benefit of members and journalists.  Our director would now like to do the same thing for Italy, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal.  We've been assigned this project to oversee and spent part of the week, reworking the questions and ideas for responses to be given to the participants. Then we will send them off to translation and start working with the National Public Affairs Directors in each country to line up members to interview on camera.  We also started uploading images onto country websites for the webmasters to use with future articles.

Elaine was called today as assistant Relief Society secretary.  We're preparing a musical number with other missionaries for the Church employee Christmas party and organizing a Twelve Days of Christmas service project for some families in our Ward.

Adding to our list of Tender Mercies this week, Toni Fetzer emailed and is having his dad search their records to see if we are related.  I mailed him a T-shirt with the Fetzer Woodwork logo and Joan is checking out the records he scanned and emailed.  Thanks, Joan. 

Two missionary couples joined us for dinner and games here Friday evening.  They raved about how big our kitchen is so we're not anxious for our city apartment to be completed.  As it hasn't been started yet we needn't worry. We enjoyed an English session in the temple (which by the way is closer than the Salt Lake Temple at home) Saturday morning and a baptism in our Ward of a sharp Spanish young adult who has been studying with the missionaries for a year.  The room was full to over flowing with supportive members.

Some more things you may not see back home:

Trees don't go on sale until the 8th of December!

Huge piles of sugar beets in all the fields.

Roadside electric fences.  Pray your kids can read.

No big slabs of cement anywhere.  These small  pavers are easy to remove for repairs.

THE FETZERS OF ROTHENBURG

We change the bulletin board a few times a week with mostly positive articles about the Church. This one says "God in a backpack."

Most interesting experience of the week, while we were strolling down a Rothenburg street, on Saturday Elaine just happens to notice a young man taking his mail of the mail box and sees the name “Fetzer” written in small letters on the mailbox. Elaine immediately accosts this young man like he is her long-lost nephew.  He knows only his grandfather and also knows they are not related to the Fetzer vineyards in California.  He speaks good English and says his house has been owned by Fetzers for about 100 years. We take his picture and leave Tony with our card and tell him to email us and we will share all our Fetzer family history with him.  Also we invite him to come stay with us when he comes next to the US. Needless to say, Elaine was pretty excited..

Friday evening we did a temple session in French with a group of Saints that had been there all week from near Paris.  It got me thinking of the one person whose conversion I felt I had something to do with  - a young single man in Montpellier by the name of Christian Terreaux.  When we got home, just for fun I googled " Christian Terreaux SDJ" (LDS in French) and low and behold up came a French You Tube Video of Christian Terreaux, Director of the Family History Center in Nimes France, which is just up the road from Montpellier.  The video was an interview of him describing what happens at the Family History Center. So good to know he has stayed active in the church and I am hopeful of getting to see him or at least speak to him while we are here. I put a comment on the website with my email address and I can write to the bishop of the Nimes Ward to get his address. I’ll count this a tender mercy.

Our Europe Image Library.  We mailed to 28 countries who each have their own Church website.

We're organizing VIP gifts in the dungeon (our basement storage.)

This is Tony Fetzer who is studying computer technology in Munich and was home for the weekend.

This is the Fetzer home in Rothenburg.

So surprised to see my name on a mailbox in Rothenburg.

Christmas shopping in Rothenburg.

I was interested to read a piece written this week by Bob Bennett, former Senator from the State of Utah, penned during a Paris conference dedicated to analysis of the 2012 presidential election. Among Europeans, he notes 70% would favor the current President.  Not that they dislike Mitt Romney, they know nothing about him, except that he is a Mormon. But if that means he is a religious person that is a big negative.  It seems all religions in Europe are considered suspect.  No European politician, he says, can afford to be seen as devout or he would not be taken seriously.  Mr. Bennett attributes this attitude to a long history of government supported religion in Europe.  After the 2^nd World War these religions lost their privileged positions and when people were no longer forced to give support, religion lost its hold on their loyalties.  In contrast, America’s long separation of church and state encourages continued lively religious discussion as faiths compete for adherents.  So Mr. Bennett concludes American presidents will continue to embrace religion and Europeans will continue to be amazed by it.

This week we finished our photo and video cataloging project by burning DVDs and mailing them with a picture index to all the National Public Affairs Directors.  In our cover letter we encourage directors to let us know what additional local images would be helpful to them and we would come and do some on-site photography.

On Saturday (excited story above) we enjoyed a day trip to Rothenburg to see this well-preserved medieval town a couple hours south.  The town was a major trading center from about 1200-1400, before falling off the main trade route.  It was spared during the war because the wife of an air force general knew of the town’s history and convinced her husband it was worth saving. Nazis there agreed to vacate to spare the town from being bombed.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE KICKED OUT OF YOUR OFFICE BECAUSE IT IS BEING PAINTED:

1. Hop in the car and head south.  Pray the fog lifts so you can see something.

 2. Check into your hotel in Oberamergau and look at the view from your window.

 3. Catch a cog train in Eibsee.

 4, At the top, view the alps of Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

 5. Go sledding. On a glacier. On the highest mountain in Germany, the Zugspitze.

 6. Make friends with the locals.

7. Visit mad King Ludwig's Linderhof Castle.

8.Return to the city of your childhood, Munich, and view the crown jewels.

 8. Eat in the Ratskeller on Marienplatz.

 9. Learn what the Germans mean by "a glass of beer" at the Hoffbrau Haus while hearing the locals sway and sing along with the oompah band.

 8. With the best companion a missionary could every ask for.

1.